Marie Hardwick, East L.A. Artist, Crippled by Hit-and-Run After LACMA Film Screening

A 24-year-old artist who lives in East L.A. was plowed down by a hit-and-run driver in a black BMW convertible on Sunday morning, according to friends on Facebook.

LA Observed and CBS LA have since picked up the story -- a terrifying one, and all too characteristic of the thousands of hit-and-runs that Los Angeles sees every year.

Marie Hardwick had just attended a film screening at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, when...

... a beamer with no license plates reportedly sped through the intersection of Wilshire and Spaulding at the east end of the museum, throwing its victim to the pavement.

Looking at the LACMA calendar, it appears Hardwick, who was hit around 2 a.m., had attended a portion of the 24-hour screening of Christian Marclay's avant-garde art film The Clock. The museum describes it as a "single-channel montage constructed from thousands of moments of cinema and television history depicting the passage of time."

The young woman is still in the ICU at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, says her father, Ian Hardwick.

He says she had internal bleeding and was in surgery for 11 hours.

Her friend Alyssa Archambault, who's been driving the online campaign to find the BMW driver who fled, writes on Facebook that the victim is "very, very badly injured and is expected to be in the hospital for many months." Her father tells CBS LA that "both knee caps are broken, tendons are ripped off, a jaw was smashed in."

Archambault wasn't at the scene of the accident, but tells us that from what she's gathered, Hardwick was "crossing the street, leaving the museum" when she was hit. "Her friend went ahead of her, and she followed behind," says Archambault.

A blogger writes on KCRW that "there were two men in the black BMW. The driver did not stop." Also, that an exterior mirror cracked off in the crash.

According to Hardwick's father, she's a jewelry designer from England who "goes to all the art openings in L.A., and also has works shown herself."

He has an amazingly kind attitude toward the man who hit his daughter and drove off into the night. "I felt sorry for him, to be honest with you," he says. However, "I thought the right thing, the thing 90 percent of us would do, would be to pull over and say, 'Uh-oh.'"